Even today in the British Isles there are places remote from mobile phone signals, TV transmissions and laptop connectivity, and we were staying in one of them when the riots broke out 600 miles to the south. The house had a radio, though, and for a few nights we listened to the BBC's 10pm news bulletins. We weren't exactly "gathered around" the radio like a family listening to Chamberlain telling them they were now at war with Germany, but we stopped what we were doing and gave the news our respectful attention. Islington, which is where we live, was mentioned as a new location of looting and burning. Through the window we could see the peaks of Assynt grow black in the dusk. For a moment, it was possible to feel like one of those little evacuees who were expelled from London 70 years ago with a gas mask round their necks.

Alex Salmond entered the fray on the second morning with his complaint about broadcasters describing the riots as "in the UK" when they were confined to English cities. It could damage Scotland's tourist trade, said the first minister, and encourage copycat action north of the border (presumably by reminding people in Scotland that they were also UK citizens and could also loot and burn – giving them what therapists call "permission"). "We know we have a different kind of society in Scotland," he said.

The unionist opposition in Scotland – Labour, Lib Dem, Tory – accused him of cheap political point-scoring and "gloating", but that day on the shore I met a couple of families on holiday from Dundee, and they quite passionately agreed with him. One or two of them were social workers. They mentioned Glasgow police's successful strategy in steering youths away from gang violence, which was also praised by David Cameron (though the evidence comes from a tiny study confined to 23 people), and how sad and embittered their English colleagues seemed when they met them at conferences. Scottish society was not only different, in their view it was in significant ways superior.

This is a new and unexpected note in Scotland: a sort of pity for the state of England.

From its beginnings, modern Scottish nationalism at its demotic level has fed from ideas of victimhood, or what Annabel Goldie, the leader (still) of the Scottish Tories, once called the culture of "girn and grievance". It would be unwise to imagine this has vanished for good; there may be all kinds of London-Edinburgh quarrels between now and the referendum on independence in which the finger of blame is pointed firmly south. But at the moment, from the Scottish perspective, England looks a more fractious, turbulent and uncertain society. Its innovations look like stunts; while Scotland plans to save money by amalgamating police forces, for example, England's route to efficiency is by electing police commissioners. Its politicians are both shriller and more callow. When Nick Clegg called for the dying Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to be re-imprisoned, Salmond calmly pointed out that it was undesirable on compassionate grounds, and in any case impossible, because Libya's transitional government would never agree to it. Clegg came out of the exchange like a two-bit opportunist at the Oxford Union.

None of this helps the unionist cause, which has problems much deeper than the memory of Thatcherism, with solutions that will be harder than separating the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party from London control and giving it another name. The Lib Dems could well be wiped out at the next election. Labour struggles to find a new leader and (other than unionism) any exploitable difference from an SNP government whose social policies appeal more to Labour voters than those offered by Blair and Brown, or so far devised by Ed Miliband. Only a minority of the electorate favours independence, and nobody can be sure of what, constitutionally and economically, independence will actually mean; Salmond is ambiguous. But meanwhile, the arguments for unionism have declined to a bromide ("We are stronger together," as Alistair Darling said this week) that is beginning to sit uncomfortably with how England is increasingly perceived.

Anglophobia has always existed as a kind of stubborn hobby, but Anglophilia (the love that dare not speak its name) lived with it side by side. The latter found an entirely practical expression. According to Professor Tom Devine's newly published history of the Scottish diaspora, To the Ends of the Earth, an estimated 600,000 Scots moved across the border to England between 1841 and 1911 in a pattern of emigration that has continued, more or less, ever since. Perhaps they didn't come because they liked Dickens and Shakespeare, but nor were they driven out of their country by poverty. Scotland was one of the world's most prosperous industrial regions throughout this period, and the emigrants tended to be skilled workers, clerks and itchy-footed professionals in search of better opportunities. My father became part of this exodus in 1930 when he moved to a job in a Lancashire mill. Several mills and 22 years later he returned to Fife, but he always spoke affectionately of his English life: the warmth of the people, his nights at the Workers' Educational Association, the bike trips to half-timbered villages in Cheshire.

Forty years later I echoed his behaviour and found a job in London. A friend took me for a farewell drink in Glasgow the night before I left. I was nervous. London! "Don't worry," my friend said. "If you can live in Glasgow you can live anywhere." I knew what he meant. Glasgow was then a byword for all that London – or any English city – wasn't. It had criminal gangs, men with razor-scarred cheeks, squalid housing, football warfare and spectacular alcohol habits. Of course, there was much more to Glasgow than the caricature, but the contrast with London was profound. I came to a city where polite men drank half pints in pubs decorated with brass plates and old prints. It would not have been wrong then, or in my father's time, to see England as a more successful, more open-spirited and jollier country than the one you had left behind.

Some of this contrast still survives, especially in the statistics for alcohol abuse and life expectancy in urban west Scotland, but the idea that England is enviable (and therefore resentable) is draining away. Neither phobia nor philia quite manages to describe Scottish feelings, if they can be generalised at all. In a way, this should be good news for the union – an end to tedious prejudices and the flag-waving rivalries of the football ground. But England's (or if you like, the United Kingdom's) political, economic and social difficulties have simply twisted the conventional nationalist position – that the union is bad – and turned it into a question: what good does it do?

There have been no convincing answers so far; the eventual outcome will depend on whether they can be found.

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